A Thousand New Yorkers Queue Around the Block as Insta360 Opens Its First US Store
The Chinese camera maker's first US flagship opened on Broadway in Times Square on September 19, with the queue reported at over a thousand people, the first customer arriving at 2:30 a.m. — and its newest cameras topping sales charts on both sides of the Pacific.
The queue began forming before dawn on Broadway: the first customer arrived at half past two in the morning, and by opening time the line for Insta360's first US flagship store had, by US media estimates, passed a thousand people, folding around two street corners past a Skechers and a Tissot. Some waited nearly ten hours, Shenzhen TV's news desk reported. The occasion was the September 19 opening of the Chinese camera maker's first American store, in the most famous retail corridor in the United States.
Who was in it tells its own story. A racing driver had flown in from Egypt for the opening. A father and son queued so the boy could mark his tenth birthday with one of the company's panoramic cameras. In the store's comment sections, would-be customers posted in English and Chinese alike — "I'm gonna be waiting first on line starting Thursday at noon baby!" read one; "So jealous I can't be there!!" another.
For an international reader the scene is worth a second look because it inverts a familiar image. The sight of a long queue outside an Apple Store waiting for a new iPhone became, over the past decade, shorthand for China's role as the world's eager consumer of gadgets. This week Chinese social media is trading the mirror image: side-by-side pictures of the Times Square crowd under captions reading "Americans queue to buy Insta360," relishing the reversal. The photography outlet Xitek, which ran the gallery, framed it without irony: from Tokyo to New York, Chinese imaging brands are now the ones making the world line up.
The commercial substance behind the queue is real. Insta360 says its two newest products, the Luna Ultra and the X6 panoramic camera, currently hold the top spots in camera sales on the major e-commerce platforms in both China and the United States — the same dual-market lead it claims for the store's opening. The company also marked the opening by passing a milestone: ten million cameras shipped since launch. That is a scale no Chinese camera brand has reached before, and it has been built on the kind of product the queue itself displayed — pocket gimbals and 360-degree cameras that sit in a niche Apple never occupied.
The Times Square store is the brand's first in the US, and it opened not in a mall or a tech district but on Broadway, three blocks from where tourists queue for Broadway shows. Whether the crowds hold beyond opening week is the open question; what the week has already settled is that the queue outside a Chinese camera store is no longer the punchline of a joke — it is the photograph Chinese social media is celebrating.